Issue 6: Winter 2010
The Ages of Reason: Eric Rohmer's 'A Summer's Tale'
Tony McKibbin
Is Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été, 1996) a work about procrastination or self-amplification? Does the film's central character miss out on many of life's opportunities, or does he couch them in fresh and original ways, and does philosophy help us understand what these ways are? Here we have a young man holidaying alone in Brittany who finds himself with the possibility of three girlfriends. During the film's running time he sleeps with none of them, and at the end leaves alone. According to the Sight and Sound critic, John Wrathall, Gaspard is a character who shores himself up against life by his non-commitment. And if we were to go along, say, with Philip Roth's womanizing character in The Professor of Desire, when he talks about the possibilities in sex and love, ‘Either the furnace or the hearth. Ah, this must be what is meant by the possibilities of youth', we could conclude that Gaspard is genuinely mis-spending his.
But how, the film might be asking, can Gaspard spend his youth wisely? Two comments from the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard here come to mind. One concerns the idea that our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards; the other that "most people never really in all their lives manage to become more than they were in childhood and youth; immediacy with a little dash of reflection added." Maybe what is central to a well-being of the self is that one does manage to inject into this inevitable forward living life enough reflection to live it as if it were to some degree lived backward. Perhaps it's true to say Gaspard never quite engages with life, can never quite accept himself as part of the flux and superimposes his own subjectivity on events. At one stage he tells one of the three girls, Margot, the waitress and ethnographic PhD student, that life has to revolve around him, but at the same time he insists this isn't egoistical; more a reflection of his perspective on life. And yet within this take on existence, he has a great respect for the contingent. He's in the coastal town of Dinard hoping to bump into his girlfriend, who may possibly be holidaying in the area. Though he doesn't even have her number, he assumes they will probably accidentally meet. He refuses to even strenuously search for her, and instead enjoys slack, easy days wandering the beaches, swimming, and taking walks with Margot. He suggests that his casual, non-commital approach allowed him to meet her, and by the end of the film - though he could have had a relationship with the voluptuous and forthright local girl Solange or stayed with his girlfriend - the meaningful moments have most obviously come with Margot. They'll never forget their walks together, they insist, as they part.
Even his relationship with Solange, though, hasn't been without emotional significance. Though they snuggle up warmly on the couch at her parent's place, she nevertheless insists they won't sleep together. She has a rule she always sticks to - never to have sex with a guy on a first date. But in other ways they've become close, and we may see Rohmer's film as the antithesis to the sort of abject cinema that preoccupied French filmmaking for much of the decade and into the next. For if in abjection nervous excitation and its connection to obliviousness is centrally present, then in Rohmer nervous excitation almost always gives way to a sort of cerebral memory building. If Kierkegaard's disdainful comments about the absence of reflection fit particularly into certain forms of abjection, then is Rohmer one of those fimmakers trying to inject reflection into action?
If so, this is partly because the characters practice what Henri Bergson calls the interval, the gap between thought and action. Dorothea Olikowski in her book The Ruin of Representation describes it thus: "Such a moment arises in what Bergson calls the "interval" between received stimulus and executed movement - that is, in the interval of duration between excitation and reaction." This allows for the possibilities in two types of becoming. In one "there is a becoming that orients itself toward what [Luce] Irigaray refers to as the outside - that is, toward matter, perception and objects - and thus toward the spatialized representation of objects. Additionally, there is a becoming that orients itself in accordance with affectivity." Thus when Gaspard insists that he needs the world to pass through his subjectivity, this needn't be seen as extreme narcissism, or even solipsism, but instead a respect for a period of time in which the action is given over to the thought; to the contemplation of the action. It's in the contemplation of the possible action that the action becomes one's own. However what stops this take on life from becoming narcissistic, or solipsistic, or even egoistic, is that the character knows his relative place in the world. When he puts himself at the centre of it, this isn't to try and dictate terms on the world as an egoist might, but much more an issue of creating for oneself a relativistic place in that universe. It's in this fairly obvious sense that the film, for all Gaspard's insistence that he subjectivises the world, goes by the name of A Summer's Tale.
How do we square this apparent circle where we have on the one hand a character who insistently superimposes himself on the world, and on the other a natural world that is constantly framing him, and who readily accepts this framing? It is here we might compare the film to Godard's nauseous central character in Le Mepris (1963). In Godard's film we may notice how Paul's (Michel Piccoli) consideration towards himself was impinged upon by his unwillingness to see nature and his and his wife Camille's (Brigitte Bardot) own smallness in the world, though Godard constantly alludes to nature's presence and their relative insignificance. As Leo Bersani and Ullyses Dutoit propose in their book Forms of Being, such characters can be so often "immobilised in the subject's illusion of their uniqueness," "the modern couple - a Paul and Camile -become imprisoned in bodies that have lost the power to remember and to see". Now it's this relationship with himself and the world that proves vital to Gaspard, and thus we can say what matters most to him is the walks he takes with Margot, because it's the most full expression of self and the world. Here in these scenes Rohmer follows Gaspard and Margot as they simultaneously explore the Brittany coast and their own mental landscape and arrive at a mutual sense of well-being, though they feel under no obligation to consummate the relationship. Yes, there's the moment when Margot and Gaspard moves towards a degree of affection, but Gaspard's desire to turn it into active seduction fails dismally. This may have nothing to do with Margot's feelings towards Gaspard - which are undeniably warm, perhaps even romantically so - but more that her respect for the simultaneous exploration would appear violated by a seductive moment.
We could even call this action, on Gaspard's part, a negative interval, with the hint of premeditation ruining the occasion, where the interval should be, and generally has been, taking place on another level - that level of mutual self-exploration. This may suggest that Rohmer's cinema is necessarily chaste, and certainly Wrathall isn't alone in criticising Rohmer for the abstinence he forces upon his characters. But we should see it as much more a cinema of connection that doesn't want to work too ambitiously. Rohmer's problematic is in many ways already advancing the contained problem touched upon by Godard - the problem of feeling beyond the self - but then to expect Rohmer to go much further and resolve the issue of sexuality as well as the problem of communication is to demand too much from the filmmaker. We should think less of Rohmer's morality - the idea of general sexual abstinence - than his ethics, the way he works through many problems of the self in relation to others and the world, and most especially the natural one. So when Rohmer shows failed conquest, he does so in relation to searching out successful connections; to the point that, as we've seen here, the very connection can negate the superficiality of seduction. What seems to fascinate Rohmer most of all is the possibilities in positive intervals, the sort of positive intervals he proposed when famously saying he wasn't so much interested in what a character was doing, but what a character was thinking while he was doing it. If Margot seems so dismissive of Gaspard's pass, does it not lie in the way that she feels the mutual exploration of selves has given way to a premeditated predictability?
We might think here of something Jalil Toufic touches upon his book (Over) Sensitivity when he writes about the desire to absent sub-text from conversation, so that what takes place is a mutual revelation of feeling. As he says in a footnote at the end of the book: "Never could I stand gossip." What he most respects is "talk that is not chatter because for once it is not floating on an interior monologue." Most conversations, he believes, don't achieve this mutual disclosure because they're invaded by too many thought viruses, where each individual is much more concerned about how they're perceived, instead of how they're expressing themselves. From this point of view Toufic's comments segue into some of R. D. Laing's pronouncements about self and other in The Divided Self. Detailing the notion of an unreal man, Laing writes "his whole life has been torn between his desire to reveal himself and his desire to conceal himself. We all share this problem with him and we have all arrived at a more or less satisfactory solution." But we could add that this solution also contains more sub-text than we might feel comfortable with. If the unreal man Laing talks of feels he's made of glass, of such transparency and fragility that a look directed at him "splinters him to bits and penetrates straight through him", Laing is obviously talking about a higher degree of instability than most of us possess, but it is perhaps just the crisis of inter-communication offered in extreme form. Now Rohmer certainly isn't dealing with the instability Laing's writing about, but often his characters do want to dissolve certain communicative boundaries, evident in the conversations between Gaspard and Margot, Delphine's openness in The Green Ray (Le rayon vert, 1986), the central characters in A Winter's Tale (Conte d'hiver, 1992), The Good Marriage (Le beau mariage, 1982) and Full Moon in Paris (Les nuits de la pleine lune, 1984), all justifying their behaviour. As Laing says, "we have our secrets and our need to confess", and this need is more pronounced in Rohmer's work than in almost any other in cinema. It's as if Rohmer chooses to half ignore bodies because the mind is the most important problem, and not a pathological problem; merely a communicative problem that Rohmer investigates.
We can perhaps see this general question at work in his earlier Pauline at the Beach (Pauline a la plage, 1982), for example, where there's a scene with four characters, but with two of them seducing each other through the very presence of sub-text. This certainly allows the characters (played by Feodor Atkine and Arielle Dombasle) to move towards sex - later that night, after attending a dance club, the characters spend the night together. So while ostensibly the conversation that takes place between the four characters serves as an exploration of their emotions, we can see that for two of the characters - the ones who do most of the talking - it's a move toward sexual communion. Rohmer shows here that the scene functions off a sub-text that allows for sexual energy, but fails to allow the characters - in what Foucault once explored in relation to the way the Ancients would explore their thoughts with others - to ‘show oneself'. If one could explore in abjection how often this showing oneself functions as a negative self-showing, as a way of forcing one's subjectivity on another through the sort of extreme actions evident in Isabelle Huppert films like Malina (Werner Schroeter, 1991), The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001) or La Cerémonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995), then in Rohmer he all but eschews even the sex so central to abjection, for the linguistic showing of oneself. Foucault describes it thus in relation to the Ancients: "To write is thus to "show oneself", to project oneself into view, to make one's own face appear in the other's presence." Obviously Foucault is here talking specifically about writing, but the writing that can lead onto a ‘face to face meeting'. Foucault goes on to say that "...by this it should be understood that the letter is both a gaze that one focuses on the addressee (through the missive he receives, he feels looked at) and a way of offering oneself to his gaze by what one tells him about oneself." Thus, when critics talk about Rohmer as one of the most literary of filmmakers, central to this notion is the private aspect of his films and their generation of intimacy. The letter writing is eschewed, but it's transposed to a conversational form. Certainly this intimacy is rarely a sexual intimacy, and much more a revelation of thoughts, but generally this only works if the thinkers involved accept the importance of an intimacy that is not especially seductive, but much more mutually revelatory.
Now there are major writers of course that fly in the face of such a notion, and where the very idea of seduction and falling in love requires the opposite of this meeting of minds; that it's instead important that we keep whatever is on our mind from the other person. It's a tradition that includes Kierkegaard, Proust, Deleuze and Baudrillard, with Deleuze utilising Proust and Baudrillard sourcing Kierkegaard. In his book Proust and Signs, Deleuze quotes Proust saying "the [intellectually] mediocre woman one was amazed to find them loving, enriched their universe much more than any intelligent woman could have done." Deleuze adds, "There exists an intoxication, afforded by rudimentary natures and substances because they are rich in signs. With the beloved mediocre woman, we return to the origins of humanity, that is, to the moments when the signs prevailed over explicit content, and hieroglaphs over letters: this woman "communicates" nothing to us, but unceasingly produces signs which must be deciphered." Deleuze reckons though this love for a ‘worthless' woman may suggest we're wasting our time, instead "we are often pursuing an obscure apprenticeship..." Such an approach doesn't lead to communication, but if anything a certain kind of epistemological evolution that is very subjective.
Baudrillard, meanwhile, in Seduction, believes "the seducer's artifices reflects the girl's seductive nature", seduction is "not therefore a frontal attack, but of a diagonal seduction that glides like a (brush?) stroke (and what is more seductive than a stroke of wit?) with its vivacity and economy, and its use of the same duplicated materials...The seducer's weapons are the same as those of the girl, but turned against her." In Deleuze's take we have woman as a semiotic multiplicity always escaping the man's grasp, but nevertheless in the process he learns the craft of signs. In Baudrillard the man masters the woman on the basis of mastering the signs, of comprehending the woman's weapons and using them against her.
If the former results in an apparent failure leading to a greater success, and the latter to a more immediate and categorical conquest, neither quite resembles the sort of possibilities at work in Rohmer, here, even if both the Deleuzian and Baudrillardian methods have of course served him usefully, partially, on a number of occasions. We can think back to La collectioneuse (1967) and Claire's Knee (Le genou de Claire, 1970), for example, and how Patrick Bauchau in the former works through all the permutations involved in seducing/not seducing a young flirt holidaying at the same locale. In the latter, meanwhile, the central character determines to do no more than touch the girl of the title's knee. In both films the central characters never get close to knowing the girls in each instance, but that is part of their exercise in self-understanding. If in Deleuze and Baudrillard we have respectively a certain type of failure and a certain type of success, in Rohmer's two films however we have much more the conceit that functions as self-mastery. The characters quite deliberately attempt to alienate themselves from the object of desire by setting in motion a game that's based so much more on their singular subjectivity than co-subjectivity. This has nothing ostensibly to do with showing oneself but is nevertheless consistent with another aspect of self-technology Foucault saw at work in the Ancients. In an essay called ‘The Hermeneutic of the Subject', Foucault alludes to Epictetus, saying, "one needs to determine whether or not one is affected or moved by the thing that is represented, and what reason one has for being or not being affected in that way"
This ties in with things said by Baudrillard on Seduction, but functions very differently. Baudrillard believes "...if seduction is a passion or destiny, it is usually the opposite passion that prevails - that of not being seduced. We struggle to confirm ourselves in our truth: we fight against that which seeks to seduce us. In this struggle all means are acceptable, ranging from relentlessly seducing the other in order not to be seduced oneself, to pretending to be seduced in order to cut all seduction short." In the latter instance though we chiefly have a power game, as we seek to have power over another, while in Foucault's account there is instead simply the notion of self-mastery. If one refuses to be seduced in any obvious sense in Foucault's take (and by extension Rohmer's), then it's not really about power but a certain type of self-overcoming. When it looks like falling into the category of power and seduction (as in a fumbled attempt at seducing the tease in La collectionneuse, Gaspard's move towards kissing Margot here) Rohmer registers its ineptitude; an ineptitude coming out of a false belief: a belief that we can control the world seductively. Baudrillard may say that in seduction ‘I do not want to love, cherish, or even please you, but to seduce you - and my only concern is not that you love or please me, but that you are seduced,' but it is as though Rohmer wants to work through a system of attraction that by-passes the game-playing of seduction, be that subjectively - as in La Collectioneuse and Claire's Knee -- or intersubjectively, as in The Green Ray and A Summer's Tale. This doesn't mean there isn't something seductive about Gaspard and Margot's relationship, but the seduction is not about protecting and game-playing subjectivities, but fitting into a world that's seductive. If Gaspard finally takes off to pursue his music rather than choose one of the three women, it's because this offers the most meaningful world, as he chooses to buy an instrument that proves more ‘seductive' than any woman. Generally in Rohmer the seductive characters are presented hollowly - the girlfriend here, Marion in Pauline at the Beach, the ex in Love in the Afternoon (L'amour, l'aprés-midi, 1972) - and their hollowness lies partially in their belief in having a paramount place in the seductiveness of the world. Rohmer generally wants to show the notion of seduction based on multiple variables that undermine the egoistic and anthropocentric.
The spiritual cannot come, it seems, through seduction in Rohmer's work, though this is one of Baudrillard's claims in his book where, after talking about the seducer's weapons turned against the woman, quoted above, he goes on to say, ‘and it is this reversibility that gives the strategy its spiritual appeal.' Obviously this doesn't make Baudrillard wrong, just that his mode of seduction has little to do with Rohmer's, where the world must become seductive for seduction to take place. We could say this leads to a Rohmeresque paradox, where characters who are more obsessed with the interval than almost any in cinema nevertheless still function off a curious contingency. The interval doesn't work as pre-meditation, though, or scheming, especially, but as a waiting game, a wait often predicated not on a clearly thought out plan leading to action, but more a wait without singular purpose but amplifying opportunity. Though Gaspard says that his waiting game with his girlfriend gave him the opportunity to meet Margot, there's a half-hearted opportunism there: he's right to believe it but not so correct in saying it. To think it is to accept the contingent aspect; to say it is to push it into the area of motivation and the move towards conscious seduction.
Rohmer's philosophy lies in a world that believes in seduction, à la Baudrillard, but believes in it as an aspect of the world that contains the human. If someone tries to claim too significant a place in the seductiveness of the world, then some greater irony will probably put their subjectivity into perspective. This is true in both The Good Marriage and also My Night at Maud's. In both instances it isn't strictly seduction that's practised but very close to it. In the former film a young woman sees a lawyer on the train and insists that this will be the man she shall marry. There proves to be no interest on the man's part, and though she tries numerous ploys to win him over, he remains uninterested. At the end of the film, however, there's a chance that she was right to have such a strong feeling on the train, but wrong to think that this feeling was in relation to the man she pursues. She was perhaps right in relation to another man altogether, who was on the same train at the beginning of the film and who shows up on a train at the end. In My Night at Maud's a similar subjectivity is at work. Here the central character insists that he will marry a particular, virtuous young woman, and offers his perspective: that because he believes she's the woman for him, and that central to this belief is her virtuousness, then he can't fail. However, come the end of the film Rohmer works an irony. In this instance our hero finds out that the friend whom he talked to about his prospective love was in fact the anonymous lover that the friend had told him about before they'd met. She was both not as virtuous as Jean Paul Trintignant's character thought, and on top of which the friend knew exactly how un-virtuous she happened to be.
Now Rohmer doesn't categorically believe that subjectivity isn't important, it's much more that subjectivity must be contained by a wider perspective. In both instances, in The Good Marriage and My Night at Maud's, the character's monomaniacal take on the world is checked. But it's as though Rohmer goes with the idea of subjective feeling but is less willing to go with subjective fact. We must be open to the contingent, Rohmer suggests. Thus it is perfectly okay to feel part of the process of seductiveness, but we should be aware that any imposition on the world might be countered by the wider variables at work. This is chiefly where Rohmer differs from both Deleuze in relation to Proust and Baudrillard (most especially in relation to Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer) and is much closer to Foucault and his take on the Ancients.
In The Green Ray we can see how this notion of the feeling was absolutely vital, but instead of superimposing a series of signs on these feelings, its heroine Delphine waits for the coincidence of nature and love, allowing for the film's happy ending. We might initially think that her life is based chiefly on denial and timidity - but that is only if we see the notion of denial and timidity based on things. Often we think of denial when rejecting things from our lives, but of course as Delphine explains in the scene where she details her vegetarianism, she doesn't want to reject things, but amplify certain feelings - most especially the feeling of lightness vegetarianism gives her. Thus she doesn't explain herself in relation to the conventional vegetarian arguments - about animals rights, of how we could feed millions more if we gave over land to corn and wheat instead of to animals - but in relation to subjective feeling. Just as the heroine of A Winter's Tale insists she's against abortion not for moral reasons, but much more for personal ones, so Delphine is against vegetarianism for subjective reasons. But in each instance their subjectivity isn't an imposing subjectivity, but a tentative one, tentative in the sense that it isn't based on a feeling that is then promptly turned into a noun - a person - but much more on an ineffable sense of a feeling's significance.
Gaspard is in many ways somewhere in between. He realises after his half-hearted pass that what's important about Margot isn't her attraction to him, and any ego sustenance he might get out of the situation, but much more the way they can answer each other's unanswered questions: the way they amplify each other's feelings. It's the variables of the world to which one must insistently be attuned. The notion of being driven, or even its Rohmeresque equivalent, imposingly subjective, leaves the characters too closed off to its possibilities. It's here where Gaspard's apparent procrastination and indecisiveness needs to be seen from a broader perspective than that proposed by Wrathall, who sees Gaspard as yet another Rohmer character shoring himself up against life. We could just as readily say he's a Rohmer character trying to open himself up to life, even if in this openness there seems to be procrastination at work. It's not that Gaspard can't make a decision and ends up with no one in his life, but more perhaps that he's constantly navigating his feelings as he tries to find the greatest amplification. When Rohmer once said that he believed much more in verbs than nouns, it lay in this need to explore the feelings of life rather than its subjects and objects. Certainly at the end of the film Gaspard is picking up a musical object from someone, but Rohmer registers this item in such a way that we see it opening up Gaspard's life. And not opening it up to nauseous multiple possibilities that he promptly has to shut down, but to a sense of well-being, the comfortable feeling, that says he might devote his life to music, but feels under no great pressure to do one thing over another.
Why, however, we may ask, does Gaspard not feel more nauseous in the face of the choices available to him? How has Rohmer managed to create questions similar to those explored by other masters of, more or less, his era (Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, Resnais) around the nature of choosing and not arrived at the nauseous, Sartrean problem of the viscosity of things? If we might say that nauseousness seems to stem from the chaos of choice, the vertiginoussness of choosing, then how with the same number of choices can someone like Gaspard not suffer this nauseous state? There are several reasons. Maybe the most obvious and least optimistic lies in youthfulness. In a film like La Dolce Vita we can note the existential question ‘what am I going to do with my life?', and how Marcello constantly pushes it aside so that one hits forty and still hasn't come close to answering it. Here it is more or less the first time Gaspard has moved towards asking the question, so there's no sense of vertigo in all the times he's asked the question and failed to act upon its answer, the way Marcello so obviously fails to act upon his own expectations of himself. This leads into a second reason. Gaspard seems to be asking the existential question much more tentatively than Marcello, with less expectations about the right way to lead one's life, so that even if he ‘fails' his own loose demands upon himself, that's okay, because there are other ways to live, always other options. The third perhaps lies in Gaspard's relative celibacy. This obviously hasn't been deliberate, but it is easily acceptable. Gaspard would have liked to make love to Margot and Solange, but there's no real sense of frustration in that he hasn't. Finally he doesn't live in a post-theological world where meaning has collapsed, a la Fellini, or a clearly commodified one, as in Godard, but in a world where meaning is constantly being generated and negotiated. As Raymond Durgnat said in a Sight and Sound article, Rohmer's characters "seek not so much to know one another's ‘real', ‘deep' emotions (Puritan-Romantic emphases), but rather to negotiate and harmonise interests, moral and amoral. They're calculating, not only in cynical but also in moral or friendly ways." Durgnat adds "their art of happiness stresses not so much ‘good (unselfish) or natural behaviour (Puritan/Romantic priorities), but the adjustment of egoistic and moral strategies (generosity, special obligations, general goodwill). It evokes the Age of Reason." This is of course the title of a Sartre novel, but the focus is rather different.
So Rohmer's characters often escape nauseousness. Their being lies not just in impacting upon reality, but creating terms, states, modes, in which reality can be tackled on multiple terms. Thus humans aren't in competition with each other in impacting upon reality with their minimal available modes (which meets the need perhaps of ego psychology and certainly capitalism), but that they create the mode that suits their needs in a world that needn't always be impacted upon. This allows in fact for something close to a sort of Nietzschean perspectivism, evident in Deleuze's The Logic of Sense when Deleuze contrasts the Liebnizian with the Nietzchean, saying that Leibniz "subjected the points of view to exclusive rules such that each opened onto the others only insofar as they converged...With Nietzsche, on the contrary, the point of view is opened onto a divergence which it affirms." Thus "Nietzsche's perspective - his perspectivism - is a much more profound art than Leibniz's point of view; for divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, and disjunction no longer a means of separation. Incompossibility is now a means of communication."
We can see this at work in Claire's Knee when Jerome says, "I am certain I deserve her [Claire] more than anyone." "...In every woman there's a vulnerable spot. For some, it's the nape of the neck, the waist, the hands. For Claire, in that position, with that lighting, it was the knee. It was the magnetic pole of my desire, the spot where, had I been allowed to follow my desire, I would have placed my hand. As her boyfriend did. In all innocence, in all stupidity. His hand was stupid, first and foremost. And that shocked me." He then goes on to say whilst this might seem an easy conquest, nevertheless the caress of her knee has to be granted. Sure the boyfriend touches it casually, but nevertheless within that touch a world of trust and meaningfulness has been built into it. How can Jerome achieve the equivalent degree of trust and meaning for the purposes simply of touching that knee, and on terms that have nothing to do with conventional rules of affectionate acceptance but instead on a very pre-meditated, intellectually thought through set of subtle actions? When Foucault talks about Epictetus tackling Socrates' notion of the ‘unexamined life is not worth living', Foucault shows how Epictetus's interest is very specific. Where the examination "Socrates was talking about was the one to which he intended to subject himself and others apropos of ignorance, knowledge, and the non-knowledge of this ignorance", Epictetus was much more interested in the individual in relation to the world: how he perceives the information he receives. In this sense there are similarities between Deleuze on Proust, and Rohmer - the self-examination one seeks is in relation to the signs that we interpret. But we can seek this signification-search in maybe a less emotionally chaotic way than in Proust. We can choose to search it out self-consciously, as Jerome does, or try and search it out mutually, as Gaspard and Margot move towards.
Foucault, writing on a certain type of overcome self where "this pleasure...is a state that is neither accompanied nor followed by any form of disturbance in the body or mind. It is defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of ourselves and therefore escapes our control", might at first seem to be offering an example of control freakery. But it's merely asking of each individual that they see themselves autonomously, first and foremost; that anything which enters into that autonomy can become the hint at mutually evolving selves present in A Summer's Tale, as Gaspard and Margot converse and become more themselves and at the same time more at one with each other and the world. Rohmer's films can seem like lightweight accounts of indecisive behaviour, but they contain within them possibilities far beyond the work of many filmmakers whose concerns may be more pessimistically explored, but no more deeply felt.
Tony McKibbin is an independent writer and teacher who writes for The List in Edinburgh and various film and literary journals worldwide.